Saturday, February 16, 2013

A Slightly Rude Best of the Rest

Probably the most shared on-line interactive map of the last week has been the Vaguely Rude Map.

The Vaguely Rude Map is a faithful compendium and atlas of rude place names around the world. The map has proved particularly popular with British broadsheet newspapers, so I'm assuming that the map appeals somehow to the British sense of humour.

The map's creator Gary Gale has written a blog post explaining the British love of innuendo and how he created the map (the GeoPlanet API, Stamen map tiles, Leaflet & OSM). The map's GitHub even includes a warning, "

"If you're not British, it might be confusing why this is amusing".

The most shared non-nteractive map this week has to be Neil Freeman's Fifty States of the USA map. This map takes a radical approach to fixing the electoral college.

Freeman argues that the biggest problem with "the electoral college is that the states of the United States are too disparate in size and influence". Freeman has therefore redrawn the map of the USA with 50 new states of equal population.

Somehow I can't see his proposal being adopted any time soon.

My personal favourite this week was Airbnb's mapped visualisation of their growth since 2008.

There are actually a few maps on Airbnb Annual but the first map is the most impressive.
I really like how the time-line on the map is controlled by the browser scrollbar. Scroll down on the page and observe how new markers are added to the map as the time-line progresses.